Admin wrote:Red Wedding should have been the finale. After that, the real finale was boring.

From a pure TV standpoint, I would agree... it would be the perfect HOLY **** ending to a season.

However, this is not a typical show and there are many more story lines that needed to be advanced prior to next season. I think it greatly suffered from not having a natural ending more than anything... so they did the best they could with the remaining story lines. I maintain that the ending would have worked better if they included the taking of the city in the same episode.

There is a LOT of **** left to go down in the remainder of the Book 3 material, so setting up all of the other characters going forward was required, I think. If they weren't limited to ten 50-57 minute episodes per season, perhaps they could get away with stopping at the RW.

Plus, they probably figured that the episode following the RW was likely to disappoint no matter what so they figured they would get the immediate fallout out of the way now and then hit the ground running for S4.

Along with Ned Stark in the next to last episode, you kind of have to resolve some things to set up the next season. I can't wait for season 4, I think it should probably be the best one at least in terms of action, pacing, and overall character development.

The first few hundred pages or so of ASoS is pretty slow in general, they left off right when it starts to get really good.

A minor point that I think is too basic to be a spoiler: In the books, the secret gate in the Wall at the Nightfort is guarded by a magical, talking gate that will only open for a brother of the Night’s Watch who recites the oath in front of it. I assume HBO didn’t want to spend the money on special effects for something so minor to the story. Still, watching the show people might wonder why the wildlings went to so much trouble to climb the wall when they just could have traipsed through that big freakin’ tunnel that leads to an abandoned and unguarded fort on the other side of the Wall.

Ah yeah. I didn't really think about it much during the episode, but that is a bit of a plot hole. I mean it's supposed to be secret and all, but still you'd think the Wildlings would have explored the length of the wall before trying to climb the GD thing. Guess you're not supposed to think about it much.